I’m not getting the results i want YET, but i am learning a whole bunch, and it’ll probably be waaay better next time. So I"m going to get through this, ask some questions, and do it again. Although if anybody can help me with this question it’d be greatly appreciated. Why do my textures look so low res? Should I be doing something differently? Rendering out my texture map in 4k maybe?

The main criticism I got was, the flame was too hot, and the smoke lasted too longSo i played around with it last night and got two versions. Top version. I shortened the flash, and the length of time the smoke is around, and added in a bit of a delay before the actual explosion happens.

Bottom version; I shortened the flash further, and significantly decreased the time on the life time of the smoke.

I want to add debris to the explosion later, and then try to recreate this again this weekend. So i can really nail down the process, then maybe start working on some fire.

forgot to update here, but here are the most recent effects i'm working on. The barrel fire is based off the same barrel fires You see in Borderlands 2. The volcano spell is based off of the Druids Fissure spell in diablo 2 LODand the explosion is..an explosion haha.

Doing the VFX for a project with some friends from Game school Online. Not much to it this time. I'm just iterating on what I already know. Uv distortion is my preferred method of getting anything done, it just gives me some outstanding results. Flips books are cool, but they never seem to get me where I want. I might just not be doing it right, but I feel like i can get pretty close to actual fire using distortion.

First time doing a blood splatter. THank god for Andreas Glad's tutorial. I'm slowly getting more familiar with houdini, and I"d really like to put it into my every day usage. (It's the waiting that gets me. I'd like a computer with more cores, but thats going to have to wait.).

SO this effect is meant to be a blood impact for a creature in a game I"m working on. The creature is like a medical abomination, human/insect hybrid. I'm trying to take notes from Borderlands and gears of war for their impacts, SO I think the next things i'm going to do, after I produce more simulations, is add some action lines, and maybe a small shock wave, for exaggeration.

Making another blood splat sim. I’m having a lot of fun with these. Way more than I anticipated. I"m going to try and keep doing more of these until its second nature, and I can just get these out of Houdini without even thinking about it.

There still isn’t an initial muzzle flash. I will work on that part tonight, while tweaking the impact.I think there should be a much bigger explosion at the end, and a flash.In addition, not enough parts of this effect are glowing. There should also be some gravity so this “rainbow wave” falls to the ground as it dissipates.I also think an erosion would be nice.

The main criticism I got so far was that
-The Waves should be falling
-There is not central point for this effect. It looks like it's just appearing from the floor, an not from an impact point (I"m not sure how to resolve that, i guess make a bright flash?).
-The bands look too paint/candy like, make them more like some form of energy (I"m also not sure how to resolve for that either).
-And most importantly. Make sure I get rid of those hard edges on the mesh. (I'm also not sure how to do that.).
One thing I"d like to do, is project the colors across the particles themselves. So they're not stacking like they are here. Would I need to use Particle Sub UV's for that?
Any criticism and help you guys could give would be ultra appreciated. Thank you so much!

Havent updated the rainbow in a while. This is where I'm at right now.

There are still quite a few things i want to work on, but the competition is almost over, So i'll have to wrap it up soon i guess. I"ve learned so much from this project. I cant wait to start the next one.

New effect i'm working on, its a buildup for the Druids Molten Boulder effect From Diablo 2. I have to work on those textures, but i'm not too concerned with that. I figure i can just fix and replace it later, once i get the shapes and timing down.

- I was trying to do too much with too little, so for each section of this effect, i added in a few things to make it feel "thicker". or that it wasnt just billboards flying around.

- i simplified some of the textures. I was trying to do too much, so i broke textures up into the parts that i needed. For example, that buildup in the beginning was using a texture that was supposed to have motion, as well as rays of light. I ended up breaking that up into 4 parts with a much more dynamic result.

-Overall I adjusted the timing and duration of a lot of the effects, so that they happen much faster, and more on time. I want this to be a spell that could be case at least once ever 2 seconds. I'll have to check my timing on that